(What I just said to another specialist list, lightly modified. I am aware that this is mostly not about engineering - there is some in the penultimate paragraph, following on earlier discussion.)

I'm not surprised at this morning's announcement, after what Inmarsat told the Guardian's Gwen Topham yesterday. Inmarsat is not party to the investigation and when everybody and her mother starts saying "look, our data say the plane's not in the Gulf" then it's time to come clean.

Turns out Malaysia has been sitting on perfectly good military radar data from two sites for a week. I bet China and Vietnam are real happy about the resources they've spent scouring the Gulf when the lead investigator already knew the airplane wasn't there. China especially about being kept in the dark as to what had happened to its citizens. The US knew also, and must have inferred that Malaysia must have known, especially after the Air Force chief hinted strongly at it earlier in the week. No wonder the announcement was made by the PM!

The politics of all this is going to be interesting :-) First, there has been unprecedented military and political cooperation between Malaysia, Vietnam and China. Second, the lead already knew for most of that time that it would be fruitless. Or maybe the level of cooperation is higher than we thought and Malaysia told China and Vietnam "listen, we're convinced it's not in the Gulf but we don't want the hijacking entity to know that we know just yet, to give the US a bit more time to figure out where the plane is, so don't withdraw your assets."

One wonders, peripherally, what it was that the NZ oil-rig worker saw. A burning weather balloon or payload? Or just too many mushrooms after dinner?

Incidentally, this shows all that guff from Trimble and others about the "necessity" for real-time flight data transmission is just that. If Boeing succeeds in figuring out a way to do it cheaply for the airlines, it'll be a nice-to-have. But must-have it is not.

> On 14 Mar 2014, at 21:17, Peter Bernard Ladkin <ladkin_at_xxxxxx
> > The picture is more coherent than it seems.